When I was learning to call I read about diagramming dances (I completely
forget where).  For an equal turn dance you write the dancers as "l" and
"r" for the ones and "-" for the twos.  The top of the hall is the top of
the page.  You mark these down at each step through the dance:

r l
- -

A1 (16) Neighbor balance and Swing

- -
r l

A2 (8) Ravens chain

- r
- l

A2 (8) Promenade across

l -
r -

etc.

I usually find I can keep things clear enough that I can track what a given
call will do to the dancers, and having all the stages written down is
helpful for looking back.

Jeff





On Sun, Feb 9, 2020 at 3:21 PM Alan J Rosenthal via Contra Callers <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I use chess pieces.  It's not all that different to what you are doing with
> magnets except that I think it meets the objectives you state in your
> message.
>
> Partners are same pieces of a different colour (e.g. a pawn's partner is
> a pawn, etc, and you only use one pair of pawns).  You can use black to
> represent Larks etc (or the other way around obviously).  Couples are
> arranged in some meaningful order to you, such as by the value of the
> chess piece or by height.
>
> Then after you move them all around for a while, you can still tell who's
> who.
>
> Actually I bought four different colours of chess pieces from
> https://www.chesshouse.com (five years ago, so things there might have
> changed).  I've never used them to play chess.  (I had in mind to make a
> youtube video about how some dance progressions work, which I may or may
> not manage to do some day.  But I've used them to work out dances a lot.)
>
> regards,
> ajr, dancing in and near Toronto, Canada
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